HP Inc. CEO, Workday CEO, Williams Sonoma CEO & Splunk CEO

**Jim Cramer** (0:01)
My mission is simple, to make you money.
There's always a homework in summer, and I promise to help you find it. Mad Money starts now.
Welcome to Mad Money. Welcome to Cramer America. I'll be one of my friends who's trying to make you some money. My job is not just to entertain you, but to educate and teach you. So call me at 1-800-743-CNBC or tweet me at Jim Cramer. Six months in, and the pandemics collided with business in ways that we could never have anticipated, including today, where the Dow gained 160 points, S&P advanced 0.17%, but the Nasdaq dipped 0.34%. Sure, not everything's changed. We still care about the Federal Reserve.

**SPEAKER_3** (0:47)
They know nothing!

**Jim Cramer** (0:48)
Just kidding. Or the President's speech tonight at the Republican convention. But the core question at the heart of this market is very simple. Do you think we can beat COVID-19 sometime soon? Or are you expecting it to plague us well into next year? That can be difficult to see because we still spend so much time focusing on stuff that mattered pre-COVID. For example, today we were obsessed with Fed Chief Jay Powell's big annual speech at Jackson Hole, now televised because of the pandemic. We parsed every word, and frankly, it wasn't worth parsing. Powell started his tenure as a prisoner of the flimsy orthodoxy. But these days he's gotten borderline revolutionary because he doesn't want to be the reason the economy falls apart. He's saying forget the foolish ways of past 40 years plus years of Fed Chiefs. Forget it. His goal is to help the economy period until the pandemics lit.
It's joyful. He's really smart and really good guy.
Anyway, you might think there'd be a huge positive at the stock market, but you have to remember that's a stock market a lot. It's like a supermarket. I mean, look, there are some aisles that we really want to go to when the virus is raging, and there's others we want to go to when it's on the ropes. Because we don't really know when we'll beat this thing, I've been telling you to take a barbell approach to investing. A lot of people on Twitter have asked me what that is. It means, in the age of COVID, you need some stocks from the recovery aisle and some stocks from the pandemic aisle, chiefly the tech companies that help us digitize seamlessly, rapidly, and with no cyber intrusions. Tonight, you'll be hearing from four companies that are all about revolutionizing computer equipment, retail and the cloud to help businesses and people like you cope with the pandemic. The land grabs for Internet Mindshare continue to grab headlines, though. Today, we learned that Microsoft and Walmart want to team up to buy TikTok, the Chinese-owned video sharing site that's become, I have to say, it's sadly a worldwide sensation. I mean, the average TikTok user is spending 50 minutes a day watching really silly videos. Many of those users are going to be future Walmart shoppers, and you can advertise there, so both stocks liked it.
But don't forget the other end of the barbell, the side that powers higher when we got COVID on the run. The recovery plays got a huge boost last night when Abbott Labs, ABT, announced a 15-minute COVID test with great reliability that you can take, basically, you go to the drugstore, boom, you got it like that. Cutting out the labs that have been such a terrible bottleneck, and today we learned the president is buying $150 million. I think Abbott's come up with a game changer. I'm going to give you more on that one later because I've been really spending a huge amount of time on it. Beyond Abbott, the pin action sparked a rally in the recovery stock, so that's travel, leisure and the financials reward, because rapid fire testing is essential to fully reopen the economy safely and also cause credit problems to drop, especially since Abbott's got an app that effectively vouches for your health if the test comes up negative. I got the app, it just took me a few minutes to download.
It's not bad, it's called Navica, and I'm able to be able to tell you like this, I can wind to go on an airplane, I don't have COVID, boom. Okay, the company says they can produce 50 million of these by October. Imagine what that means. If you know your fellow passengers are done with the virus, you'll be a lot more willing to fly or book a cruise. Will the euphoria last?
It can't last. Abbott can start selling them next week, though it will take some time before they can make a difference. Still, I see this as a major positive. However, unbetting some of the changes from the past six months are going to be permanent.